NCOs dressing down fresh arrivals who didn’t clean their rifles or had Frito Lay in their gas-mask bags always began, “When Joe Chink comes across that line [fill in the blank]. Joe Chink. The imaginary Chinamen poised across the DMZ sharpening their bayonets. We were there to scare them into not coming South, and whup if they did. 50,000 of us.
They’re still over there waiting, those GIs, 25,000 of them, but nowadays I doubt they’re being threatened with Joe Chink. Joe Chink makes the parts for all their weapons, ammunition, their boots, every item of their equipment. Joe Chink loans money to their overlords to pay for it and pay their salaries.
And back in the God, Country and My Baby heaven Joe Chink’s athletic shoes carry America’s finest boys and jerseys up and down pastures carrying Joe Chink’s footballs for the edification of cheering spectators wearing Joe Chink’s clothing, head-t0-foot.
Back then most of us who had any knowledge of the Republic of Korea military didn’t have much doubt the ROK Army [South Korean] could whip the pants off the US Army if they wanted to, and have plenty left over to take care of Joe Chink if he came across the DMZ.
But nowadays it’s probably North Koreans the US Army’s scaring into not doing anything ugly to all those factories in South Korea making the rest of what US consumers need but can’t get from Joe Chink. Factories, and the ROK Army which could almost certainly still whip the pants off those 25,000 GIs still over there.
“Thank you for your service,” romantic patriots are fond of saying.
Morning to you readers. I’m obliged you came by for a read.
If I’m going to get anywhere in this life I think I’m going to have to learn how to not be so stupid.
Yesterday I made that post about the F350 wiring, which I’d been fretting and gnashing my teeth about for months. Ben offered to try to find me a wiring diagram, and tffnguy recommended a Ford Truck Enthusiasts Forum. I felt fairly uppidy and hopeful, but not sky-high enthusiastic because I’ve learned the hard way to suppress my melodrama.
But I went to the Forum site and immediately remembered I’d been there before, several months ago. The reason I remembered was the popup advertisement for Phoenix University that blocked the entire screen and came back as soon as I clicked the X, every time. The site took forever to load on a dialup, too. So I blew it off and spent the next few months twiddling my thumbs trying to find ways to fix the immediate problem.
But yesterday, because of tffnguy’s recommendation I fought my way through the esoterica, waited while things loaded, killed popups as though I could dress them out and have them for supper. Registered, posted a question about the wiring, along with pics, and asked for any help anyone could offer.
In a matter of hours I had a reply and a wiring diagram. Now I’m back where I could have been several months ago if I’d had the patience and determination to wait for that site to load and posted an identical request back then.
Gale’s fond of saying that during the 40-odd years we’ve been friends every mutual acquaintance, if asked to list my traits would have had, “If there’s an easy way and a hard way, he’ll pick the hard way and stay to the end.”
Maybe I’m beginning to understand what they were talking about. If I can get that grapefruit out of my mouth I might try to sort it out and change it.
Good morning readers. Thanks for coming by for a read this morning.
Maybe I was too much like the guy in the picture above trying to find a vet to work on his dog. I borrowed Little Red yesterday and drove into Harper to talk to the Real Mechanic I had in mind to work on the New Truck.
He seemed a nice enough guy, but when I explained what I had in mind, described the truck and the problem, he explained he didn’t care to have anything to do with it.
There’s another Real Mechanic in town, but I decided to back off and think about how to approach this a bit more rather than ask and have him say, ‘no’, too.
The frustrating thing about it all is the fact I could get that truck running well enough to drive it into town myself if I could find photographs of the wiring on a running 1983 F350 with a similar engine. I’d replace the wiring myself, then just take it in to get whatever else needs doing for an inspection sticker.
Today I’m posting a plea on Kerrville and Fredericksburg Freecycle groups for under-the-hood photos with the air cleaner removed from anyone owning a running truck of that vintage. If that doesn’t turn up anything I’ll post on Kerrville Marketplace group offering whatever price it takes to get photos, I reckons.
Crazycrazycrazycrazy. I honestly never anticipated a man in the bidness of fixing cars would refuse to fix one. Guess the economy isn’t as bad as I’ve been hearing it is.
Maybe I need to find a vet.
Old Jules
Today on Ask Old Jules:
Old Jules, what was the happiest time in your life?
I’ve been mildly curious watching myself for a considerable while. Weight was peeling off me and I was forgetting to eat. My body would notify me I hadn’t eaten anything in a day or two by a dose of the blind staggers, or just a dizzy spell to get me thinking back on when I last ate something.
Most of what I cook around here’s cheap and simple because of the fact I ran out of propane early last year and haven’t refilled the bottle, and because hauling water makes washing cookware an expense measured in hauling trips. So I was living mostly on potato combinations, yogurt combinations, fruit combinations and various bean concoctions. I was at the point of hating to look any one of them in the eye.
Then one day in the Salvation Army Thrift Store in Kerrvillle I saw that rice and veggie steamer still in the box for sale for a dollar. It didn’t appear to ever have been used. So, I bought it, thinking rice and steamed veggies would at least be different.
Sheeze, the best purchase since my High Roller back in 1972. The tow bar I bought the other day might turn out to be a better deal, but I haven’t figured out anyway to cook with it. But I’ve digressed.
What I’ve re-discovered is the absolute, euphoria-laden joy of food. I’m making better meals on that thing than I could even find in a restaurant in town, but if I could, couldn’t afford them. I’ll make up a batch of one or another Asian-like mix thinking it will last two days, then find I have to fight a war with myself to keep from eating it at a single sitting.
It does require loads of fresh onion, garlic, jalapeno, cayenne, curry and ginger. I buy bags of trail mix of various sorts, dried mango, papaya, raisins and cranberrys at the Dollar Tree and pour on top, a little of each. The food bills went up something awful last month. But I don’t forget to eat.
And the simple truth is, some of these meals turn out to be classed among the best I’m able to recall having anytime in my life.
Anyone says an old dog can’t learn new tricks is kidding himself.
Good morning readers. Thanks for coming by for a read this morning.
When I began posting this blog just before the end of June last year,
The Great Speckled Bird: Respecting our Betters, my life was a somewhat different place, though it hasn’t changed much by outward appearance. Mainly what’s changed is priorities. Time has speeded up for me in a sense. Things I’ve needed to be doing all along, but were on the back burner indefinitely have fought their way to the front burner and now are holding the high ground.
The season that’s been attempting to pass itself off as a winter here seems every day to be assuming the attire of early spring. Which is to say, I need to be doing spring-like things inside the priority mix, instead of winter things, and the spring activity demands this year will be somewhat different from last year.
One of the ways that will manifest itself is that I’ll be posting less regularly on this blog, trying to spend more time doing higher priority activities. A lot of the projects I had planned, or was working on during the blog months are going to be abandoned or allowed to be pushed into abstractions for some future time, except one.
So the frequent and somewhat regular posting here will change to a target-of-opportunity mode.
Jeanne will continue posting the Ask Old Jules entries, and I’ll probably occasionally post something there also, as time allows.
I’m no good predicting the future, but my intention, within the context of what the Coincidence Coordinators will allow, is to have this shelter and the area immediately around it back mostly as it was when I arrived several years ago. Including me being somewhere else. Most of my priority juggling is going to try to fit itself into that as best it can.
Hopefully the ancient Mayans had all that figured out and that’s what all the hoopla about the Mayan calendar’s really about. The cats and me experiencing another pesky reincarnation without the Universe raising any eyebrows.
Seems the advantages of being out of sight and out of mind for most of the population aren’t necessarily advantages when the out-of-sight geography includes something a multi-national corporation wants. All those city folks needing to keep the air conditioners turned down to 70 and to be able to light up the hair dryers every morning probably never ask themselves where the electricity popped out of the ground and hopped into the wires they plug things into.
One more bug on the windshield of civilization. Old Jules
[The following letter was written by former Hopi Tribe chairman Benjamin H. Nuvamsa from Shungopavi. He presented the letter to the Hopi Tribal Council on Friday January 13, 2012]
January 13, 2012
Hopi Tribal Council
Hopi – Tewa Senom
It is time we have a serious discussion about coal mining on our reservation, our water rights and our environment. For far too long, we have pushed these issues aside, not willing to talk about how these issues impact our lives. We must talk about how the Peabody Western Coal Company and Navajo Generating Station are affecting our lives. Since the mid 1960’s, Peabody Coal has been mining our coal, pumping our precious Navajo Aquifer water and paying us pennies on the dollar in return. Navajo Generating Station is emitting dangerous and harmful particulates into the air we breathe. Our coal resources are being depleted. Our Navajo Aquifer has been damaged…
Good morning readers and thanks for coming by for a read.
Hopefully by the time you read this I’ll be strutting like a peacock, wearing my Texas Hatters Manny Gammidge High Roller tilted at a jaunty angle, certain I’m a smarty-pants extraordinaire. At least that’s how I’m planning the final chapter of this monumental butt show.
But it’s 7:56 pm Monday evening, and I’m 43 % done on a 79 mb download of a modem driver. Six hours 29 minutes from now the box says, I’ll know whether this is going to work. Except I’ll be in bed six hours and 29 minutes from now, unless I pick that as one of the times I get up to pee.
But here’s the rundown on the plot thus far.
Ed’s comment reminded me I had a weirdly shaped and sized hard drive I’d yanked out of an old Vista E Machine I bought new at WalMart a few years ago and it died after about six months and $150 spent in repair shops.
So I pulled open the Dell and voil’aismimo! The drive looked more-or-less the same as the one from the E Machine, aside from some extra parts. I worked an hour-or-so getting the extra parts off the Dell drive and onto the E Machine one, installed it, reassembled everything, clenched my teeth really hard and squeezed my eyes shut and I turned that commie pig on.
She booted spang up, showed me a screen I hadn’t seen since the E Machine died. But, the fly in the ointment was that the modem still didn’t get recognized. I ran through a flurry of downloading alleged drivers from sites all over the web, putting them on a CD, loading in the E Dell Machine and having them snubbed like clerks in camera stores used to snub a person brought in a Brownie Hawkeye for a roll of film.
Meanwhile Norton Symantic was slipping me mickeys behind the scenes, popping screens up at me threatening to keep me company if I kept downloading from non-regular free driver places.
Which I’ll keep short by saying, led me to Dell and my current act of genius downloading 79 mb on a dialup with 12/2 Romax wrapped in electrical tape between me and the power pole.
So, tomorrow morning when you read this you’ll be seeing words of a man with a modem working on an E Dell Machine running Vista, is the way I want to end this chapter. Wearing a 1972 vintage Manny Gammidge Texas Hatters High Roller. A man commanding respect, admiration and quite possibly veneration. A man you want to be like. Same as before all this crap happened.
That’s the proposal for the chapter. Assuming the editors don’t think that 79 mb download wasn’t a high enough price for our guy to pay to get a damned modem working.
I’m going to schedule this tonight before I go to bed to post at 6:00 am. Just to make sure it goes to work before the editors finish breakfast.
Old Jules
6:46 am edit: Seems prudent to get other things done before I unplug the modem here and plug it into the other machine to test the driver. The world needs coffee before it begins the kind of foolishness this day might be destined to bring. It isn’t that I’m reluctant to step boldly into the future. It’s just a minor fit of hesitation on my part to contemplate the Odyssey Homer never had to deal with. Putting a computer on my shoulder and walking inland until someone asks me what it is might be the next step, dragging the Toyota 4-Runner along behind until someone asks me what that is, too, seems a lousy day to anticipate.
I’ve spent most of a lifetime avoiding virtue successfully without having to devote a lot of energy to doing it. But it’s gotten a lot more difficult.
For instance, I predominantly eat veggies along with some rice. If I feel the need for protein I throw in some eggs. Sounds harmless enough. I’ve got a rice steamer with a platform compartment in the top allows me to steam a mess of veggies and rice faster than I can tell it. I love it, and it’s easy to clean afterward without using any water. I run a 1.1 penny US baby-wipe wipe over it after I pour out the vittles and it’s ready to run another race.
But suddenly I’ve discovered not eating meat is at least a virtue, in some cases, a religion. Wedges me firmly between a rock and a hard place. I’ll eat a bit of meat sometimes when I can afford it, but honestly I feel better saving the money against the possibility of something coming up so’s I need money.
I’ve got a little sausage in the freezer I had Gale pick up for me last time he was in San Angelo, but in some sense it’s like the quarter-bottle of Y2K Jack Daniels Black Label sitting on the microwave drawing dust. It’s just too good to use, except on special occasions.
So, for the purposes of not being virtuous, the sausage doesn’t help much more than the Jack Daniels. I need to come up with some cheap, non-virtuous things I can do that don’t require burning any gas, borrowing a vehicle, or glutting myself more than I do when I cook up a nice Idaho potato, chop up some jalapeno, onion, half-stick of butter and smother it in yogurt or cottage cheese.
Lessee.
pride…. heck, I’m already up to my Adam’s apple with pride. Any more pride might be a hazard to my health.
covetousness Maybe that’s a possibility. Maybe I can think of something to want really badly. Nothing much comes to mind, but this is too important to reject out of hand.
envy … That would be pretty cool, finding someone to envy. But I can’t recall running across anyone I thought was enviable in so long I’m not sure I ever did.
lust … Nope. Donealready beentheredonethat with lust. I ain’t going there again.
anger …Took me 50-odd years to figure out I was an angry person, same as everyone claimed I was. Big job of work getting rid of it once I figured out I was. Anger needs to make a home in people who don’t know the tricks. I don’t think I could hold onto anger in a way it would find palatable.
gluttony . . . Gluttony might work. I’ve got 100 pounds of milo maize out there. Maybe boil some up, put some butter on it, maybe some pepper and onions. Curry. But I’d have to drop in some sausage to keep it from metamorphosing into something virtuous. Something to think about, anyway.
sloth … Sheeze! Sloth is absurd. It’s a red herring they hang out there pretending to offer up hope in case a person can’t avoid virtue some other way. But hells bells! When’s a person supposed to find any time for sloth when there’s only 24 hours in a day? Sloth is BS. Forget it.
That milo’s looking better and better. At least until I can think of some more respectable way to clear my conscience without bankrupting myself.
Hydrox jumped off my lap and stalked over to the bed.
“Sometimes you human beings disgust me with your pretense.”
Him being second-in-command around here, I try to keep him up-to-date on my thinkings and directions. Seems prudent to me because he’ll have to take over if I kick. I’d just been asking him if he thought we could get along okay living in a travel trailer.
“Just what ‘we’ are we talking about here? You and me? You and all the cats?” He glared at me. “You, the cats and the chickens?”
I shrugged, wondering where he was going with this. I felt a tirade in the making. “Just you cats and me. The chickens can’t be part of it.”
“Well, that’s a relief, anyway. But I think you need to think through this second-in-command crap and all the what-if-you-ain’t-around side of it.” He gestured with his nose toward the porch. “The only ‘we’ worth talking about involves mutual resolve. Creatures willing to allow the well-being of others within the ‘we’ to influence what they do. No creature unconcerned for the well-being of the others, no creature the others don’t have a commitment to, can be part of a meaningful ‘we’.”
I thought about it a moment. “That makes sense. It’s why I was trying to keep you up-to-snuff on things.”
His frustration was obvious. “Yeah, and that’s where you’re proving how stupid you are. For me,” He tweaked a claw under his chin, “the only ‘we’ around here is you and me. And maybe Niaid, just a whisker.”
This rattled me, but he went on before I could say anything. “When that coon on the porch ran at you and I jumped in, that’s ‘we’. When you go to town and buy food for us, that’s ‘we’. But do you see Tabby or Shiva the Cow Cat lifting a paw for me if I was starving? Do you see either of them jumping in if a coon attacked me?”
He waited while I considered it. “I suppose I don’t.”
“Then they’re not a part of any ‘we’ I belong to.”
The more I pondered it the more it seemed to me he’d come upon an important thread in the fabric of reality I’d been overlooking. Not just with cats and chickens, but with every piece of human intercourse around me most of my life.
When a person goes down to City Hall, or the County Courthouse to perform some necessary business, for instance, and the clerk begins the ritual of obstruction, a ‘we’ is in the process of being defined. The clerk is the spear-point for a huge ‘we’ of contradictory demands on the ‘we’ you occupy.
“Do you have proof of residence?”
“There’s my driver’s license.”
“That’s not enough. I need a utility bill or tax return.”
“I didn’t bring that.”
“Then I can’t help you.”
The ‘we’ that clerk represents just defined a boundary excluding you from that ‘we’ and placing you inside another ‘we’ it considers an enemy. And in a real world, that definition would be mutually recognized, rather than singularly by the human spear-point drawing the boundary.
Which is probably why representative democracy was doomed to eventual failure. In a fantasy of wishful thinking a population created ‘we’ with a set of unrealistic boundaries. When new ‘we’ entities developed around government centers those included in the ‘we’ tribes were those they associated with, lived near, shared a commonality with. In Washington, D.C. In Austin, Texas.
And inevitably those outside that ‘we’ became an obstruction, a product, an enemy to their ‘we’.
“The only ‘we’ worth talking about involves mutual resolve. Creatures willing to allow the well-being of others within the ‘we’ to influence what they do. No creature unconcerned for the well-being of the others within the ‘we’, no creature the others don’t have a commitment to, can be part of a meaningful ‘we’.”
Sometimes it takes an outsider to the human ‘we’ constructions, a feline with a firm hold on reality, to recognize the obvious.
Old Jules
“Electing pet skunks to guard the henhouse might work for a while. But the skunk-instincts and chickens behind the walls they’re guarding metamorphoses the ‘we’ they live in. The skunks become a we with a priority of digging under chicken-house walls and the we of being pet skunks fades until it no longer can call itself a we.” Josephus Minimus
A few generations ago this parking lot was full of people journeying along Route 66. People stopped here because their engines were overheating, or the kids needed to stretch their legs, or they just wanted to pause for a view of how the water divided.
The view wasn’t all that much, but a dad could walk down below with the kids, step behind a phony hogan, and tell they chillerns if they pee here their water would go both ways, ending up in two different oceans.
The hogan was a lot more inviting back then.
It hadn’t played hotel to a thousand stranded hitch-hikers and drunks looking for a roof.
The roof, of course, still held out the rain and snow.
It hadn’t entered the phase before even the drunks avoided it.
Though all the seeds were planted. All they needed was nurturing a generation or two.
Garden Deluxe comes into Gallup on tanker trucks and railcars from California. A local business family bottles it, labels it and keeps it thrifty enough so a bottle could be bought for half a US dollar when that roof still didn’t leak.
The Kachina were Hopi and Zuni. Pottery, and silversmithing, all the tribes in the area. Rugs, Navajo. But while the years took the roof off that hogan the businessmen discovered Asians can make Kachina, junk jewelry, rugs, and pottery a lot cheaper than anyone struggling to hack out a living with craftsmanship on the Rez.
The motorists didn’t care. They wanted the Made In China stamp already filling their homes in the lowlands. The world they lived in took longer to send all their own jobs to Asia.
74 years old, a resident of Leavenworth, KS, in an apartment located on the VA campus. Partnered with a black shorthaired cat named Mister Midnight. (1943-2020)
Since April, 2020, this blog is maintained by Jeanne Kasten (See "About" page for further information).
https://sofarfromheaven.com/2020/04/21/au-revoir-old-jules-jack-purcell/
I’m sharing it with you because there’s almost no likelihood you’ll believe it. This lunatic asylum I call my life has so many unexpected twists and turns I won’t even try to guess where it’s going. I’d suggest you try to find some laughs here. You won’t find wisdom. Good luck.
So Far From Heaven 